Huygens

Mission Profile

Huygens was the European Space Agency's atmospheric entry probe, delivered to Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft and released for atmospheric descent on 14 January 2005. After a 2.5-hour descent through Titan's thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere, Huygens landed on the surface and transmitted data for about 70 minutes, returning images of a river-carved landscape and measuring atmospheric composition, temperature, and wind speeds at various altitudes. The probe revealed Titan as a world with a complex organic chemistry cycle analogous to Earth's water cycle, with methane playing the role of water. Huygens remains the most distant landing ever achieved by any spacecraft and is the only landing ever made in the outer solar system.